Acapulco Gold Meet Toxic Black Mold

Opponents of marijuana legalization are trotting out cops, physicians and driving-while-impaired stats in their bid to spook California voters before November's election.

However, one buzzkiller has now produced the most damning pot pooh-poohing "evidence" of all:

TOXIC BLACK MOLD!!!

"We have all heard about the harms of black mold on humans and the devastation it can cause to a home, its ventilation system, its walls, floors and building materials," states a presumptuous Alexandra Datig of Opposition to the California Marijuana Legalization Initiative 2010.

Really? We're all heard about it? Then why am I licking a Black Mold Popsicle right now?

Continues Ms. Datig, "Stachybotrys mold needs four things to grow and turn into a deadly toxin known as the Black Mold: wood and other forms of celluiose such as plant matter, water, heat and air. Stunningly, indoor marijuana cultivation offers all four."

University of Illinois researchers, while not drawing any conclusions between indoor pot and stachybotrys (because no one asked them to), say black mold can trigger asthmatic reactions and symptoms such as extreme including nausea, vomiting, and bleeding in the lungs and nose.

Datig connects the black moldy dots by noting, like Mary Jane, stachybotrys thrive in moist, re-humidified air. Thus, if marijuana is legalized and home growing becomes even more rampant than it already is, she reasons, California homeowners and home insurers will suffer financial catastrophe.

Oh, but black mold is not the sole nasty shit turned up by her anti-pot crusade.

". . . [T]hree of the most dangerous strains of Aspergillus fungus naturally exist in marijuana plants," says Datig. "They are Aspergillus fumigitus, flavus and niger. Heat, moisture and the rate of decaying plant matter, such as the essential dry-down process of marijuana, causes a window of opportunity for the microscopic fungus to grow rapidly, resulting in deadly alfa-toxins."

The deal is, even without legalizing herb, black mold is forming now in poorly ventilated homes or those where water damage has occurred. Yet, there is no group seeking to rid California of poorly ventilated and/or water-damaged homes.

Meanwhile, Aspergillus is everywhere on the planet and people and animals breathe it all the time. Our bodies generally defend against it. When it does take the form of a disease, it invariably is suffered by someone with an already weakened immune system.

So, make sure to sign the petitions outside Target for the Opposition to the California Weakened Immune System Initiative 2012.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.